Small Town Gigabit Networks Planned in Oregon and Mississippi

This week brings two more announcements involving small town gigabit networks. One comes from LS Networks, a company formed by a consortium of electric cooperatives, which will offer broadband at speeds between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps in rural Maupin (OR). The other announcement comes from MaxxSouth Broadband, a company that operates fiber-to-the-home networks in three Mississippi markets and plans to launch gigabit service in Oxford (MI) – a college town with a population of 20,000. Smaller town gigabit networks are more common than one might expect, because many of the smaller carriers that serve those towns had previously deployed fiber-to-the-home networks, which in many cases can be easily upgraded to support gigabit service. Neither the LS Networks nor the MaxxSouth Broadband announcement today involved a network upgrade, however. Both companies are making their initial fiber-to-the-home deployments in the announced communities.